Sunday, May 14, 2017

Not Seeing The Spin

This item from The Old Gray Lady, Reported by Mr Peter Baker and Ms Maggie Haberman, 13 May of this year, is an example of looking at something through the other end of the tube.

The Headline, and the Story, suggest that President Trump has a problem because he can't get past the election. For a lot of Les Deplorables out there the problem is that those who didn't vote for Mr Trump can not get over the fact that he won, and thus maintain that he is illegitimate.

Funnily enough, the photo with the article is of protestors in front of the White House calling for Impeachment, calling President Trump "Putin's Stooge", and suggesting lies and coverups. That is to say, President Trump is illegitimate. No wonder the President thinks folks are out to get him. And just look at the Democrats in Congress, and out of Congress. The most outspoken is California Representative Maxine Waters (from near where I used to vote, in the Los Angeles Basin).♠ One has the impression House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer are not far behind her.

This is a rather long excerpt from the article:

WASHINGTON — In the small dining room next to the Oval Office where he works much of the time, President Trump keeps a stack of color-coded maps of the United States representing the results of the 2016 election. The counties he won are blotchy red and span most of the nation.

Mr. Trump sometimes hands the maps out to visitors as a kind of parting gift, and a framed portrait-size version was hung on a wall in the West Wing last week. In conversations, the president dwells on the map and its import, reminding visitors about how wrong the polls were and inflating the scope of his victory.

At the root of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable presidency, according to people close to him, is a deep frustration about attacks on his legitimacy, and a worry that Washington does not see him as he sees himself.

As he careens from one controversy to another, many of them of his own making — like his abrupt decision to fire the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, who was leading an investigation into the president’s associates — Mr. Trump seems determined to prove that he won the election on his own. It was not Russian interference. It was not Mr. Comey’s actions in the case involving Hillary Clinton’s emails. It was not a fluke of the Electoral College system. It was all him.

He sits in the dining room or Oval Office stewing over the Russia inquiry that Mr. Comey was managing, arguing to anyone who will listen that the matter is all a Democratic-inspired conspiracy to undermine the validity of his victory. Even as he was defending his decision to dismiss Mr. Comey last week, Mr. Trump signed an executive order creating a commission to investigate voting fraud in a quixotic effort to prove his unsubstantiated contention that he would have won the popular vote against Mrs. Clinton but for millions of ballots that were illegally cast against him.

Mr. Trump burns with frustration over not getting enough credit for winning the nation’s highest office after having never so much as run for City Council or town alderman. He ran when pundits predicted he would not, stayed in when they were certain he would drop out, never lost his core supporters and, amid a dysfunctional campaign that was known for self-inflicted wounds, propelled himself to victory over the vastly more experienced Clinton machine. He expected to be celebrated for it, and that has not happened.

“There’s a lot of anger. I’ve talked with him about it,” said Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a friend of Mr. Trump’s. “No other president in history has faced the barrage of press attacks, people calling for him to be impeached before he took the oath of office.”

“I think the way Trump looks at this is — the big club they’ve tried to get at him is the Russia collusion argument,” Mr. Ruddy added. “Trump sees this as a political attack, not a fair attack on him.”

Read the whole thing and then consider what is going on. This is important because the contested nature of the November 2016 General Election is getting in the way of working things out inside the Beltway.

Donald Trump is Mr Art of the Deal. I would say that if you can't cut a deal with Donald Trump then you should probably resign and let someone else try.

Regards — Cliff

♠ Representative Waters said, of the firing of FBI Director James Comey, it would have been fine if a theoretical President Hillary Clinton had done it, but it is bad that the actual President, Donald Trump, did it.